Victorians & Mummies
A GOOD NIGHT SNACK
PATREON EXCLUSIVE SERIES
SEASON 3 : EPISODE 1
MAY 22, 2024
A Good Night Snack is a series available exclusively for our Housekeeper and Butler tier members on Patreon.
By the 1830s, an obsession with Egypt had raced across most of Europe and much of the US. The trend became known as Egyptomania, and as one source put it, “A craze for things Egyptian had taken Europeans by storm. Diplomats and tourists, merchants and dukes, all vied with one another to assemble spectacular collections of mummies and other antiquities.”
This wasn’t just a hobby or decorating trend though, in the 1834 edition of History of Egyptian Mummies, Thomas Pettigrew commented, “No sooner was it credited that mummy constituted an article of value in the practice of medicine than many speculators embarked in the trade; the tombs were sacked, and as many mummies as could be obtained were broken into pieces for the purpose of sale.”
You heard that right, Victorians used mummies as medicine. So let’s start there, shall we?
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ARTICLES
The life and death of Mummy Brown
The significance of petroleum bitumen in ancient Egyptian mummies
The corpse on the canvas: the story of 'mummy brown' paint
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
'Mumia': The strange history of human remains ... as medicine
The Victorians Were Mad for Mummies